Reimmersing myself in Knausgaard's distinctive preoccupations, I wondered at first if I had lost the magnetic thread, that strange compulsion in the Norwegian's sprawling prose that pulls the reader through epic sprees of navel-gazing.
Nonetheless, the footage, both as shot and as edited, reveals a distinctive visual preoccupation that would flourish there and throughout his career.
To the twenty-first-century historian, the period from the late nineteenth century until the end of the Cold War is distinctive for its nationalist preoccupations, while internationalism is often construed as the purview of ideologues and idealists, a remnant of Enlightenment-era narratives of the progress of humanity into a global community.
Research by Marazziti and colleagues (1999) suggests that the brain mechanisms involved in romantic attraction may overlap substantially with those involved in obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD): Obsessive thinking and preoccupation with the tiniest details are distinctive of both phenomena, and both seem to turn on alterations occurring at the level of the serotonin (5-HT) transporter protein.
Like Christopher Logue's violent adaptations of the Iliad, it testifies to a lifetime's battle with thoughts and afterthoughts, a continual argument between the translator's own preoccupations and his sense of what is distinctive to Homer.
Immanuel Kant (1724 1804) combined a contractual account of marriage with an Augustinian preoccupation with sexual morality to argue that the distinctive content of the marriage contract was required to make sex permissible.
In the work of other writers, such as Stendhal, Gustave Flaubert, and Marcel Proust, each following his own distinctive path, a different kind of realism emerged, focused on a preoccupation with the analysis of individual action, motivation, and desire as well as a fascination with form.
Another big, new preoccupation?
But beneath its fantasy elements lie the novelists enduring preoccupations with history, memory, love and war, with the same controlled, artfully simple style that makes Ishiguro's storytelling so distinctive, and utterly beguiling.
